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As we arrived at the great white columns, the four of us stopped and had a moment of crisis about what we would do once we stepped inside. Both Jack and Gail told me not to let them say anthing, but I knew from experience that this wouldn't be the end of that point. Gail wanted to do a sortof therapist type approach followed by an earnest appeal to them that they were in fact needed. Depending on how mad they were about the situation that brought them to this extreme course of action, I had some skepticism that this approach would work. I mean, this is basic human psychology being applied to someone or someones who were so beyond human at this point…

But, what they hay. It was a valid approach, so after a nod between us, the four of us began climbing the stairs.

A man greeted us as we entered the columned area, and lead us in to speak with Calliope. She was actually very nice, very pleasant, and without a whole lot of prompting, she ended up explaining the purpose and end result of the linguistic virus. The muses had been approached by their mother, Mnemosyne, with a plan to reboot humanity. Basically, they would use the current technology that was making the Muses themselves become obselete to spread itself all over the world. And once that happened, about 6/7 of the population would be wiped out, and those remaining would be thrown back into a sort of dark-ages pre-tech civilization, where the muses would be venerated again. Their time-line on this seemed to end about a hundred years from now, so there was a reasonable amount of time to work on this.

Gail latched on to this, and entreated upon Calliope to consider other solutions that don't require the wiping out of so much of the population or resetting the progress of man so much. She presented her with a different solution, to look within the current technology to promote themselves, to update their resumes, and to get them back out to the forefront of civilization so that people could realize the muses were still there for them. A thoughtful expression remained on Calliope's face as she listened, and she didn't seem, as far as I could tell, particularly adverse to Gail's proposition.

Finally, she spoke.

She wanted to confer with her sister, and told us to wait here for a day and that Homer (they guy who lead us in??!?!) would entertain us.

A day later, eight of the nine Muses congregated before us in Calliope's hangout. They didn't seem too mad at us despite the fact that we had destroyed Clio's temple and been attacked at a Starbucks by Euterpe's influence. They had discussed it and were interested in our proposition. At the time they'd talked to their mother, no alternative plan had been presented to them, and they were willing to give us a shot at our plan. It was at this point they dropped the bomb on us.

Their sister Urania, Muse of Astronomy, was missing. And their mother promised to find her for them if they assisted her in this linguistic virus/humanity reboot plan. Thus, if we wanted them to put a stop to the plan, they would do so when we provided the whereabouts of this sister Urania. They told us she disappeared in 1630, of which Gail immediately rattled off something about Galileo. Galileo? Wasn't he some kinda star-gazer guy? I asked Calliope if Galileo had been her scion. Calliope nodded. Gail asserted that she was pretty sure that was around the time when Galileo had been sentenced to house arrest by the Catholic Church for asserting that the Earth revolved around the sun.

Well, good a place to start as any. We told the eight muses we would look into it and they bid us farewell, down a river that would lead us to Olympus in two days' time.

Off we went to update Hera.

We arrived at a dock on the edge of the Olympian overworld, and were greeted by an overly-excited Satyr, who insisted on me following him out into the forest. Jack and Gail pleasantly shooed me off, saying they'd wait, so I headed off with him into the trees.

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[you really don't want to know]

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Two hours later I returned to the docks to find Jack and Gail and Niko playing “go fish” with a deck of cards from who knows where. No one said anything about the Satyr, and a minute later we were met by Bubo who lead us off into a path through the forest, up to where Hera resided.

I wasn't precisely sure why we kept coming to talk to Hera, especially considering she probably hated the girls considering they were basically Zeus's illegitimate children, but whatevs. So I sat down and had to endure an hour of verbal wrangling between Hera and Gail over the deal we'd made with the Muses to stop their linguistic virus. I started to wonder, given how annoying the Christian God was being in all of this, that maybe the Muses' plan wasn't so bad. But I kept my mouth shut, and just sat there admiring the sculpture-work and adornment of the room in which we sat.

Finally, Hera and Gail seemed to come to some sort of agreement I guess. Then we left to go see some paraplegic dude in order for Jack to acquire some kinda gadget from him. Eh. What the heck were we doing here anyway?

Finally, after all of this side-trackery, we headed back down to the main world and over to Florence, Italy, where Galileo had lived under house arrest for his remaining days.

Once we landed in Florence, I hit up an Italian coffee shop to shoot the breeze with the locals while Gail and Jack did some research about where we should be looking. Italian guys are fun, so I decided to busy myself with one of them in his car out back. Once Gail and Jack returned, we headed up to the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence to check out some kinda of monument under which he is supposedly buried.

It was a bit creepy seeing the supernaturally faithful wandering in the church as we entered, but I wasn't intimidated really. We took a look at the monument and then I went up to talk to a priest, apparently the Monsignor, whose named happened to be Father Antonio de Marc Antonio. Hah.

I interrogated the guy for several minutes while Gail blanched behind me. She was obviously disturbed by this fellow. We went back and forth, back and forth, while I was trying to not imply a heavy interest in Galileo in particular, when Jack stepped up and all-but demanded to know where more info could be acquired of Galileo's life and some of his work instruments and such. Oh well. The good Monsignor directed us to a museum called Museo Galileo after sputtering about heretics some.

We left and went to look at the museum, but didn't find anything particularly magical there. So, back to the Basilica. We all waited outside while Gail sent her ghost to go look under the monument to see what was below ground. He reported back that there were some bones, a globe, and a telescope. He couldn't tell us if they were supernatural, but it seemed like this was our best shot at acquiring an artifact of Urania, which would in turn perhaps point us in the direction of Urania herself, not unlike how we found Calliope.

So we headed over to another coffee shop and sat down for some cafe and cakes, and talked it over. We eventually decided upon going into the sewers, the catacombs, beneath Florence, and then having Niko dig his way up to Galileo's crypt from beneath.

Later, Gail sent out her ghost to determine how far we could get just by walking/climbing/crawling beneath Florence, and then how much dirt/stone was between the closest open point and Galileo's crypt. He provided an estimate and then we headed down into the sewers/catacombs beneath Florence around mid-day. By the ghost's estimate, we should break through to Galileo around 1am that night.

Niko dug, Jack supervised, and Gail and I ran interference at the access points into the area where Niko was digging. I guess Gail had to send away some teenagers wanting to get it on; too bad! I would've just joined them and then sent them along their way! Oh well. Niko ran a little late on the digging, but he still ended up breaking through in the middle of the night, just before 2am. With that, he reached in and pulled down the two items. The telescope ended up being the one that seemed supernatural, so they tucked the globe and everything else back in the crypt and patched it back up, and then we headed back out again.

With that in hand, we called up BOOBS. He seemed grumpy, saying he'd be here in 2 hrs with his magic boat of magicalness.

He was still grumpy when he arrived to get us, and so I talked his ear off keeping him awake the whole time we sailed, until we finally pulled into… Rome. Specifically, the Holy See. Uh oh, well, that bodes ill.

We waved goodbye to BOOBS and headed off to a hotel to discuss what we would do next. Gail pulled down the floorplan of the Holy See and she and Jack poured over it to determine the likeliest place that … Urania might be. Once we had established that, we headed back to the main square in the middle of the day, Gail and I dressed like nuns and wandered inside as if we owned the place, Jack did his sneaky thing, and Niko hung around outside waiting for us.

We slipped into the inner area and met up with Jack at the kitchenette we found. It was time to decide how to plunge deeper into the inner sanctum, with all these True Believers around, their Beliefs (==Legend score) becoming more and more potent the deeper we went…